First Days In China!

Hi Everyone! I finally got my VPN account setup successfully so now I can access blogspot :) Well its been a crazy couple of days here and I feel like I have gone through every type of emotion since arriving in China!

We started our journey from Orlando on Wednesday the 23rd of June. We headed to San Fran on a 7am flight, we were supposed to leave San Fran at 2pm for our 12 1/2 hour flight to Shanghai but we were delayed for 3 hours. So when all is said and done we spent a total of about 29 hours traveling, needless to say it was a long day. I probably slept about 7-8 hours on our flight to China which I thought was not too bad, but only ended up sleeping an hour that night!

We get free breakfast at the hotel everyday which consists of some delicious rice, a hard boiled egg, and some sort of dumpling filled with meat. Its not bad and its free! I'm just wondering what rice for breakfast every morning will do to my girlish figure :) Thankfully we walk a ton so it should balance out, or I can think of it as carb loading for my next day!

So our first full day here was a long one, filled with stuff we needed to finish for work! We started at 9am and headed to the corporate building of Disney China were they have a bank (with tellers who speak broken English). We set up our bank accounts, which 12 people plus 2 teller, and your occasional Chinese line cutter equals about 3 hours of sitting around and waiting! Then we headed to lunch which was super cheap, everything is super cheap when it comes to eating in this country! After lunch we headed to best but to set up cell phones, then we headed to the regional office of Disney English...where we also got to see a bunch of the themed classrooms like the ones we will be working in at our own centers (fingers crossed my center has a Cinderella themed room). We signed our contracts and found out a little about what to expect during our Orientation, the first few days are HR stuff and learning about the Disney way, followed by our mandatory Government health check (hope I pass), and then our educational training. So we finally made it home that day by about 5:30pm, I skyped with Mom and then fell asleep until about 2am, skyped with Jeremy, put in a DVD and fell asleep from 4 to 7:30. So my body is still trying to get use to this time change.

The following day (Saturday) we got up, had our free breakfast, and went to check out The Bund. The Bund is a popular site in Shanghai filled with restaurants, upscale shopping, and hotels. Its a beautiful to see and then across the street there is a walk up along the river...I have yet to see it at night but it is supposed to take your breath away. While we were up on the river walk we met three very nice young Chinese ladies who spoke great English! They asked us to take their picture, chatted with us about our hometowns, and then so graciously invited us to a traditional Chinese tea ceremony. For those of you whom may travel and visit China in the future kindly decline and move on...this is apparently a common scam that they like to rope you into and you walk away spending at least $100 dollars, we were not aware of this but thankfully kindly declined their offer and waited for one of the girls from our group to join us. It wasn't until about 10 minutes later one of the girls opened her guidebook to a page describing this same exact scam! After The Bund we hoped on the Metro and headed to the area known as the French Concession, this neighborhood is so charming and has a Greenwich Village feel to it with tree lined streets, and posh little cafes and shopping. It's a great area and I'm sure we will be visiting this area a lot in our time here!

I have yet to take out the nice camera because it has been so rainy...and I need to pick up a digital camera one of these days! I will post picture as soon as possible. Thank you for listening to my ramblings and I will try to keep up with this blog as much as possible. I miss and love you all!

T Minus 7 Days!

As some of you may know I will be traveling to China to teach English this summer! I leave June 23rd and will be there for two months. I will try and keep up with this blog in order to keep you all updated on my life there. There is NO facebook (and many other websites)because of the strict censorship laws...so I will not try and risk deportation or rotting in a Chinese prison to keep you updated on my facebook status. I'm finding it to be very exciting but also frustrating when it comes to packing for my trip! But with helpful insight from friends and family you have all eased my stress a little bit. I wish life could just stand still while I'm gone...and I do not want to miss out on anything back here in the states! I will miss you all and I hope that you all will occasionally stop by and read this. To my family, If this is the only post I create by August 20th please come looking for me (j/k)! I hope to stay in contact through skype so you all better find me so we can video chat! I am also apologizing to Caity Whiteaker and my sister Kelly in advance for any awful spelling and grammatical errors (kind of ironic for someone who is going to teach English!). Lots of love to you all! XOXO